I'm an enthusiastic reader of Construction Physics, the blog by Brian Potter. The art direction is first-class, and I love the deep dives on metals, industrial processes, construction, and more. This book by Potter dissects how industrial products can become faster and cheaper by things like continuous manufacturing, the kanban method, design for manufacturing, and lots of other interesting methodologies.
I wish I liked it more. Partly because this book was a gift, but also I could see the brilliance in it, but the style and the adaptation to longform didn't work for me. It felt like instead of structuring around a narrative, concrete examples, or a constructive philosophy, each chapter flipped through each in succession. I enjoyed the concrete examples, but those weren't the meat of the book. The theory was interesting but I felt like it kept repeating itself and stating the obvious. I wanted to get pulled in but this took me a long time to read.
This was mostly apolitical, though it has two asterisks: The first, Potter's affiliation with the Institute for Progress, which is a centrist, somewhat anti-regulatory thinktank. The second, it's published by Stripe Press, the unbelievably well-funded and well-designed passion project of Patrick and John Collison, brothers and cofounders of Stripe. They've got a little media network that also includes Works in Progress magazine. When the alternative is the ghoulish a16z media network, it's easy to appreciate something more balanced, but there's a pretty clear pro-markets, anti-regulation tilt to most of the content - though I wouldn't know if the publisher has any influence on the text in this case.
The Employees tells the stories of a half-humanoid spaceship crew through semi-ordered interviews. Most of the interviews are short and many are dense enough that I needed to read them twice to really absorb what was being said. Oh, and it's based on a series of illustrations by Lea Gulditte Hestelund, who I'm guessing is the inspiration for the only character with a name, Dr. Lund.
I was surprised that despite all of the high-concept framing, it still worked as an engaging, entertaining novel. Ravn's critiques of productivity culture and gender work incredibly well, skillfully woven into the rest of the story.
This edition was translated from the original Swedish by Martin Aitken - something I wouldn't have noticed if I didn't read it on the back cover. The prose style was really beautiful at times, I assume preserved from the original.
People have drawn a lot of parallels between this and Ursula K. Le Guin, but from my perspective I liked it a bit more than The Left Hand of Darkness because The Employees was more focused and direct with its commentary and storytelling. It's somewhat less sci-fi feeling than most stories that occur on spaceships with humanoids.
All in all, pretty great: I would recommend reading each story twice to get the full effect.
I read The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford's newest book, in 2024, and it blew my mind. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I still think about that book a lot and consider it to be one of the most impactful things I've read. I gave me a framework to understand so many things about work, creativity, and craft, and had a clear intent, a prescription for the spiritual and societal ills that I was thinking about.
Shop Class as Soulcraft is his earlier, and judging by review counts, more popular book. It covers a lot of the same ground as The World Beyond Your Head. It's about the value of mastery, tacit knowledge, and communities of craft. It critiques the proliferation of knowledge work and, in different ways, capitalism itself. While the later book refers to Crawford's work as a motorcycle mechanic occasionally, this book has it as a centerpiece, and often draws comparisons between that job and his previous one at a think thank.
It has a lot of beautiful, quotable lines:
I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
Or:
For the neo-Darwinian, the frolicking of the dolphin is assumed to have some survival value, either for the preservation of the individual or for the passing on of its genes. I suspect that if you were to ask a dolphin about this, he would say it is backward: he lives in order to frolic, he doesn’t frolic in order to live. This is the Aristotelian view, precisely. Such activities are experienced as intrinsically good.
So: I enjoyed it a lot. Crawford's books are almost like religious texts for me: they're polemics and utopian visions that pull me into a frame of mind. I agree with a lot of what's going on, and enjoy being swept away in the philosophy.
The World Beyond Your Head is my favorite of the two, though. Both have a lot of philosophy, but Shop Class is written in the unnecessary philosophy vernacular. The World Beyond Your Head feels more developed and directed, though both are pretty broad and eclectic.
Wow: for me, this was as entertaining as Bad Blood: high-quality geopolitical business investigation.
I grew up with Apple - my dad's photo studio always had both relics and some flashy new hardware. We went to the Jacob Javits center for the Macworld expo in 1999, and I brought home a poster for the iBook. So, I loved the classic Apple content in Apple in China for its lovely nostalgia factor. I remember some of that stuff, and it was fun to look up some of the wacky computers that I have never encountered, like the eMate.
But that's not the main topic.
This is about how Apple made a huge bet on China, in which it got an enormous consumer market and unbelievable supply chain, but then became utterly dependent on China to the degree that it will take years to tool up any other country to produce the iPhone. It's also about how Tim Cook is a brilliant businessman but has obeyed China's orders at nearly every turn, whether that means staying quiet about human rights abuses, removing applications from the app store, or censoring content.
When in 2019 the company rolled out Apple TV+... Eddie Cue issued just two directives to Apple's content partners: no hardcore nudity and "avoid portraying China in a poor light"
Apple's second-best option is India, where it's trying to produce larger devices that are easier to manufacture. They've had some success there but most of the parts are still from China. It's pretty shocking to realize that the three main players - America, China, and India, are under the rule of Trump, Xi, and Modi, all what you could deem illiberal strongmen leaders. Apple diversifying from China into India would likely mean the same kind of dynamic, but catering to India's growing nationalism instead of China's.
Tim Cook has gotten a bit of heat for donating to Trump and giving him golden trinkets like a little prince, but this book makes it clear that this is the posture toward China too. You could view this as Apple having to make compromises to stay in business, or the company and its leadership never standing up to governments and rarely testing the limits of its power. Either way, the reality of Apple today is that it relies on a lot of overworked humans and is playing a dangerous game with government relationships.
I read Glenn Fleishman's writing on the internet for years before reading this book. His book about How Comics Are Made is probably more popular and appropriate for a more general audience, but this one is closer to my heart: the Elements of Typographic Style left a deep impression on me, and I grew up pretty close to the publishing industry. My dad's huge photo printers, scanners, and film developing equipment were always there as curiosities in my childhood.
It's for real fans of typesetting. This is not a general-interest fun book of stories, it is a real dive into the specifics of how the people used the machines, what the machines did, and how printing came to be. At times it was too much for even me - I kept pulling up Wikipedia pages for the printing techniques being discussed to get an overview and a few more pictures. The illustrations are amazing, in really nice historical style, but I wish there were more of them.
I love that it's as much about the people as the machines. It covers how all the technological advances changed the job market and the job. Printing used to be a really dangerous job and a really physical one. People operating the machines could get splashed with molten lead. At one stage, the letters were inked using wool-stuffed leather balls that were soaked every night in urine to keep them supple. I wish I had known about the Tiny Type Museum in time to buy one, and to own some examples of what he's talking about.
I love its discussion of the terminology. Linotype is actually just "line of type." Lots of printing terminology is based on biblical heaven-and-hell references. It had never clicked to me that the litho in lithography is for the stone used in the process. It's cool how so much of the terminology lives on in modern processes.
In Fleishman's own words, this book is "exhaustive but brief." That seems about right for the way I read it, cover to cover and in the span of a few days. Despite being less than 70 pages, it is not a quick read, even compared to Bringhurst's writing on typography.
But I love it anyway, and it's the kind of book I want to keep around and crack open once in a while to revisit this truly interesting vein of invention.
I listened to the audiobook of this memoir, which is narrated by the author.
It's very good. It's roughly what I expected: honest, moving, tough to get through at parts because some people treat trans and queer people terribly. I assume that lots of folks are already familiar with Elliot Page, but the brief backstory is that he's one of the few actors who's also a trans man, and was famous both before and after transition.
Overall: it's very different but it kind of reminded me of Bicycle Diaries because so much of the cool parts are just getting acquainted with someone who's cool. Obviously it's much more intense than that book though.
Overall: it's a good book by a cool person, happy for him.
I really loved this book. It's short enough to be called a novella by some sources - my paperback edition was 162 pages. I could read it slowly and try to absorb every sentence, and it had a lot to offer. It's quietly beautiful writing: at no point did I feel like Cole was being ornamental or trying to impress. But I came away really impressed, both at the beautiful descriptions of Lagos and the humanity of the interactions. The dialog and emotions all felt really real.
It's a novel, but spends a lot of time on the location of Lagos, Nigeria - the country's corruption, terrain, and social habits. This too felt so genuine because it's a depiction of conflicted love of a deeply flawed place that nevertheless holds emotional power and has a strong internal coherence.
Excited to read Open City from the same author - this was really great writing.
So: these reviews are about my subjective enjoyment of books. I'm not trying to give an objective rating. So sometimes I read a good book that is just not for me.
This is one of those: I really did not enjoy this book. I expected to like it: it was hyped by people I know and most of the reviews are very positive. I've enjoyed a lot of science fiction recently, and I like 'big concept' books. It's at 4.5 stars on Amazon and 4.2 on Goodreads: pretty stunning numbers. I don't think all those people are wrong, they just like something that I don't.
Why didn't I like it?
To try to sum up the book: imagine sort of a Men-In-Black setup, but instead of goofy aliens, the threats are 'antimemes' which are ideas that can attack or feed on memories. They sometimes appear embodied, sometimes aren't, some of them have mysterious backstories and others are more playful.
It's set in the modern day near the UK, but is mostly a capsule plot: you don't get many scenes from the normal world, there's no introduction in which everything is fine, a lot of the action is in or around the headquarters of the organization.
There's pretty limited character development and personality, not a ton of interiority other than people reflecting on the difficulty of the fight and whether they're capable of it.
This book is firmly in the style of Lovecraftian horror, which means themes of the unknown, cosmic dread, helplessness, and so on. That genre doesn't really work for me. I love science fiction in which a world with particular principles is constructed and you see how those play out: Octavia E. Butler and Ted Chiang are good examples of that. A world of unknowable mystery and all-encompassing dread just isn't very interesting for me. And events on a cosmic scale aren't spooky or scary to me, they're too detached from the real world.
The other thing that I really didn't like is that the world-building never ends. Or in other terms, they just keep pulling out deus ex machinas. Like it feels exhausting to build an idea in your head of what the principles of the fictional world are, and then it's revealed that in this universe there's always some new unexpected technology in the next chapter. Maybe this is meant to deepen the sense of dread: despite pulling out all the big guns (both fig. and lit.), there's no hope in sight.
So for me this was a pretty unsatisfying read. It didn't hook me with the intrigue or stun me with the world-building. I think there's a lot of context around this book that I was not exposed to: it is an outgrowth of the author's extensive online writing in the SCP Foundation online community. There's probably some fan-service happening here that's going over my head. But anyway, yeah - didn't hit.
This was an incredible read. I think it did real damage to my sleep because I couldn't put it down.
The core thread is an investigation of crimes by members of the Delta Force, a shadowy special-ops unit out of Fort Bragg (aka Fort Liberty). This is extremely well-written, with the pacing of a crime thriller and a lot of incredible details. Harp definitely put in the work talking to the wives and friends of the people involved, and his first-hand experience being in the military himself helps getting an accurate read of the culture.
But this isn't just about personal stories and individual murders or instances of drug trafficking: this also contains details about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were totally new to me.
The Taliban forbade poppy cultivation; bacha bazi, or boy play; suppressed kidnapping; and in the summer of 2001 completed a countrywide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin.
Learning more about the Taliban and the drug trade was eye-opening as someone who was too young at the time to really understand what was going on.
On March 4, North Carolina reported its first case of COVID-19, a highly contagious respiratory disease that escaped from a U.S.-funded biolab in Wuhan, China.
The one thing that did stick out to me as weird, at least, is that Harp writes about the COVID-19 lab leak theory as if it was confirmed fact. I don't have a strong opinion or any special knowledge about that, but it doesn't seem like a settled fact either way and to state it as such chipped away at my confidence in the book's accuracy a bit.
And I think that goes with the strong storytelling about international events and wars: Harp definitely has an opinion and a political stance and tends to give a straightforward explanation of things that would merit a multi-paragraph explanation if you had asked a political scientist.
This book makes you feel bad about wars and skeptical that they can ever be fought correctly or fairly. And for what these troops did to innocent people, and the psychological damage that they took home, and then how they killed people in the US as a result. It's all pretty sickening.
Here's a Tom fun fact: I got a minor in religious studies in college, which would have been a major if I wrote a thesis. And I grew up Catholic, of the northeastern laissez-faire variety, and went to a Catholic school for a few years, out of choice. This might come through in my vibe.
So, I haven't been Catholic in a while. But I have some very positive, as well as negative, thoughts about it. I've gotten my Protestantism secondhand. The early history and ideas of some Protestant wings are pretty fun: for example, I'm a big fan of aniconism, the trend of avoiding having churches without paintings, symbols, or any kind of representative art. And there's a lot of innovation around church government which is fun to look at in comparison to trends in secular government. I won't go into detail about what I'm not that jazzed about, just like I'm not going to get into the whole thing of Catholicism.
But anyway, Jesus and John Wayne is a pretty great book about American Protestantism and how a lot of churches have become something very detached from Christianity or any set of values. Instead, they've centered themselves around masculinity, white nationalism, and a worship of the military. It's pretty easy to see this in practice, but the book is very worth reading for the historical narrative and deep research.
I think it's mostly marked by emptiness for me. When it comes to accountability, ethics, or self-reflection, there are a lot of people for whom those things don't exist or matter. They embody a vibe of "I don't care."
Touching maybe a tiny bit on the Catholic-Protestant divide, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a single mention of sola fide in the book, which I think explains how supposedly faithful people forgive bad behavior - because in practice faith is valued above behavior.
It's a downer. This nearly crossed the line of books that are too close to reality for me. I just can't handle reading ten different angles of how Trump-era America is an increasingly failed and evil place.